On the use of the word “nigger” | The Press

The word that begins with N is not to be taken lightly. Some of our readers take it as a racial slur in any context, which we are sensitive to. This is why journalists from The Press use it sparingly, advocating respect and restraint, but not censorship. In the following text, the author Michaëlle Jean uses the term several times to express an opinion that deserves its place in the public debate. We prefer to warn you.

Michael Jean
Former Governor General of Canada and former Secretary General of La Francophonie

About the use of the word “nigger”: the waltz of excuses does not solve anything. The problem remains intact and that is what we must talk about.

There is the exasperation of all those who pay the price when, in its hateful charge, the word carrying the historic violence of an ever recurring racism is spat in our face. The wound remains whole and the trauma deeply rooted.

There is also how those who knew and who continue to resist, in the face of the abyssal and criminal outrage done to black peoples, have sought to ennoble the word.

Yes, appropriating the word “Nègre”, with a capital N and a charge of humanism. The international movement of Negritude, also starting from the Haitian revolution, claimed it in this way, wisely, in a subversive way.

Jean-Daniel Lafond praised in a film this “Nègre way”, assumed, demanding and emancipatory, of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, René Depestre and so many others who carried this fight very high. Hence the title of the film The Negro way: Aimé Césaire on the way.

And then there was also, to the astonishment of Aimé Césaire himself, Lafond’s film attests to this, this voice from Quebec, that of Pierre Vallières who, wanting to establish a parallel between the condition of blacks and that proletarian Quebecers humiliated by an English-speaking oligarchy, wrote in 1966 white niggers of america. The political and controversial book in question, Vallières wrote it after 29 days of hunger strike during his incarceration in Tombs prison in Manhattan, with Charles Gagnon, co-founder of the FLQ. The inspiration came to him from contact with all these black Americans who constituted the majority behind bars, but also from the Black Panthers with whom the FLQ had established links. The book was published in 1968, the public snapped it up and more than 100,000 copies were sold.

The limits of a comparison

The comparison established by Vallières all the same has its limits, and here is his argument for speaking of Quebecers, white Negroes: “Have they not, like American Blacks, been imported to serve as labor for good market in the New World? What differentiates them: only the color of the skin and the continent of origin. After three centuries, their condition has remained the same. They still constitute a reservoir of cheap labor that the holders of capital are completely free to make work or reduce to unemployment, according to their financial interests, whom they are completely free to pay badly, to mistreat and trample under foot. »

When he talks about it like this in Lafond’s film, I reply to him “the white niggers also have their black niggers”.

The difference is not only the color of the skin and the continent of origin. The blacks captured in Africa by the millions, abused, massacred, dispossessed of everything that defined their humanity, did not arrive on this continent called the Americas to conquer it, colonize it, occupy it, totally subjugate the peoples whose it was ancestral territory. They were deported there to be sold as beasts of burden and be reduced to slavery. When the White, whether French-speaking or English-speaking, proletarian or wealthy, uses the word “negro” by discharging it without concern for its heavy connotation, or even in an intentionally racist way to destroy the other, to exclude him in a even systematic, what still prevails is the ideology of white supremacy that pollutes our minds, poisons our lives and causes us to die.

Young people like the artist Ricardo Lamour and thousands of others experience it, have it in their throats and can’t take it anymore.

Whether we agree or not with Lamour, he has expressed it, challenged institutions and filed a complaint using a democratic process. I remember what the illustrious writer Victor-Lévy Beaulieu wrote about me and highlighted in his book entitled THE NEGRO QUEEN (Éditions Trois-Pistoles), in the name of his freedom to pour out his gall in a pernicious way in his chronicles against me. I could have, perhaps even should have lodged a complaint. I cashed, it was hard, hurtful, revolting, but I do not think less.

However, I consider it irresponsible that media and political personalities, from the height of their power of influence, completely disregard the threats, insults, unprecedented violence and massively unleashed racist remarks on social networks and elsewhere, against Ricardo Lamour and against all those who, like him, have dared to point out the discomfort caused by the word “nigger”.

This malaise exists and it is this that must be taken into account and debated.